I'm posting this because I'm waiting for today's rehearsal recording to be uploaded. My ageing video camera (or rather, my uncle's) screwed up the latest recording when we improved quite a bit. So unfortunate.

This morning's devotion was rather pressurising. Band: silver to gold; Drama: bronze to silver; Chinese Dance: gold to gold with honours... Strings is the only one left. Other than the pressurising part, I thought the rest of it was rather meaningful and I was more awake than usual.

Today was full dress rehearsal. No comments. Then Mr L invited a really famous violinist to come listen to us and provide feedback. We were all quite shocked and I was immediately concerned for his hearing. I can't remember exactly where he's from or his name because they were too exotic for me to catch. He was the principal violinist of the Radio Symphony orchestra (i heard of it before, so it should be famous enough) for 30 years. Wow. His comments made everyone listen up and we managed to improve quite a bit. The only obstacle would be to make sure everyone remembers everything. This was what kind of brightened up my day/week.

But then when I reached home, the most unfortunate thing happened. When I opened up my violin case to start violin practice at around 8.45pm, I suddenly saw that my D string snapped. My immediate reaction: oh no.. God, why now? 2 more days to SYF (actually less than 2 already) and my string just decided to give up on me. I remained in a state of shock for about 5 minutes. I only had Dominant strings and the were different from my current strings (diff strings have a slightly diff tone). My dad could pick up the strings I needed tmr, but then it would have less than 12 hours to season. I went around the house trying to ask for help but there was really nothing much I could do. jean kindly offered to lend me her violin for SYF since she would be playing before me. But I decided that I'll just stick to mine cus I'm not used to the shape of her violin. I finally regained composure and decided to make do with whatever I had. So now my D string is Dominant and I have to play it a lot to make sure it doesn't go out of tune during SYF. It takes roughly 2 weeks to season a string and now I have to do it in 2 days. Sigh.. I really don't know why God made this happen. So for violin practice, I decided to permanently reside in the toilet and just play the D string for half an hour. I nearly went deaf cus it's echo-y. But at least I managed to practice drawing straight bows while bowing the D string. Then I spent the remaining time focusing on Music Practical test pieces (this thurs, 1 day after SYF) and SYF pieces. Sigh.. Honestly, this unfortunate event ruined whatever hope I had left and almost made me want to just sit somewhere and give up. But then, after thinking about it, everything happens for a reason, and maybe this is just one challenge God wants me to overcome and learn from. Losing a string 2 days before SYF is really tragic. It's like getting injured before a race. I'm going to have to practice on that string and season it like siao within the next 40 hours.

Never give up, even when things are looking hopeless